I have one that I almost never use, despite keeping my relatively huge collection of vinyl around, mostly for nostalgic purposes. I can pull out an LP album jacket and tell you where and when I bought it in my youth. I've replaced much of the vinyl with CDs except for long out-of-print albums that aren't available on CD.

Dual turntables are decent, but I'd replace the Ortofon cartridge with a Shure M97he or a Grado cartridge. Back when I was editor in chief of hi-fi magazines in Canada during the vinyl era, the Ortofon cartridges never did very well in our tracking tests. They'd mistrack and distort on heavily modulated (loud) grooves. The Shure cartridges are much better trackers and have smoother and more linear frequency responses than the Ortofons. The Grado cartridges are also generally excellent, very close in performance to the Shures.

I didn't know that about the Shure cartridges. I used to have a Technics turntable with a Shure cartridge, because of the high ratings back around 1975. I wish I still had my 300 disk vinyl collection. I took very good care of them, but had bad financial problems in my first marriage and sold them all.

in my mind, this favoritism for vinyl has most of the time been a thing belonging to "purists".

at the time, i used to take excellent care of my vinyl discs, and invariably, after a few playings, i would hear faint or weak clicks and other kinds of noise floating all around my music room: on the sides and in the back. also the noise level was always distracting, specially when listening at realistic levels.

when CD's came out, i did not wait long before jumping in, and the sound was very good; better, in fact, than the black discs.

in my mind, this favoritism for vinyl has most of the time been a thing belonging to "purists".

J.B. a large part of what drove my question was that on the turn table forums, there are people who started out with CD's, that are not of the "vinyl generation" if you will. These are the people who are saying that the vinyl records sound better than their CD's.

The only possible bias that i can think of, would be a wanting to validate their turntable purchase which is entirely possible. However, i found it interesting that the digital cohort (which i am part of) is now becoming fond of vinyl, there have been several articles written discussing the growing popularity of vinyl.

So, i figure for 500$ or so, between the turntable and preamp, i would give it a try. If i decide it's not for me, i should be able to sell the turntable+preamp for about 400$, the turntable has fully depreciated, not much of a loss there.

On a side note, since a lot of us are DIY oriented type of people... I haven't seen many treads like this on other stereo/HT forums.... Jump to around page 8, that is when the photos start showing up.